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2009-03-22

In the middle of a mad work frenzy, you look up a link that a friend posts on FB coz it popped up as an email notification. Smile. Then, start clicking another.. smile more. Then another.. and another. And when your coffee became cold, you realize that you just blew an hour on it. Not regretting though :)

2009-03-19

I remember Redhat 7, Guinness. Then 'valhalla'. And then 'Shrike'. Ofcourse there were these intermediate flirtations with Slackware. And, then I touched Debian 'woody'. And, have not gone back to anything else. I remember desperately waiting for 'sarge' release. And then 'etch' release. And then 'lenny' release.

I am not quite sure as to why I am in love with this distribution. I thought it was the stability. I thought it was the package manager. I thought it was the ease of use. I thought it was the flexibility. But figured that, I just cant point to one good reason and say thats why I am stuck to debian. Looks like I am just too emotionally attached to it :P Looks like I am in love with it :)

So, why am I ranting all of a sudden? I am watching an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' happen without a single fuss, without a single tantrum. Oh it is such a pleasure. :)

2009-03-13

It is a nice feeling when old pals get back to you and scold you for not being in touch. Whoever the person is, and however the relationship was. Coz, that one single action brings up a whole lot good memories and makes you feel cozy inside :)

2009-03-10

"what the heck is this thing??""hmm... This is in the wrong place..""its just a stupid copy""you sure its just a copy""oh yeah yeah.. its just not in the right place""if it is not in the right place, it has no right to be"rm -rf /.../postgres-main//etc/init.d/postgresql-8.1 stopERROR: could not find .... blah.. blah.."HOLY SHIT""MOMMMMMMMMMM... save me.."

So, thats how, a smooth upgrade from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny, turned out to be not so smooth. After the panic attack, the blabbering, the ranting and the running around office, I settled down and thought for a second. Unmounted the volume and started googling. There were two databases in it which are being used by the rest of the office. :-S Cant afford to lose them.

Since the actual database was on a tablespace that was still intact, my first attempt was to try and recover the databases from the tablespace. Something like, create a new main database and link the tablespace to it. But, looks like the main-database has a whole lot of shit linking back and forth with every available database. So, that seemed like a bad idea.

Then got on to 'ext3grep'. Though the guy (author) was giving some hope by mentioning how he had recovered his accidentally deleted 50k+ files, he was not helping at all with the disclaimer which seemed to be coming up on every second line in the manual :( However, after 3hours, ext3grep showed me all the files that were deleted in the recent past, and I saw the 'postgres' folder there .. Sigh!!. Another 1 hour to recover the files into a new folder. Then moved it to the original place and started PostgreSQL. That 10sec startup time seemed like 10hours. Finally it came up. Checked the databases, and everything seemed fine.

2009-03-07

I have been putting 'porcupine tree' away for a real long time now. Two previous attempts were futile. I found myself trying to list what I did not like in it. I was actually looking for things that I would not normally like. And, today I was listening to it without even realizing that it was porcupine tree, and I actually liked it. So, all it required was an open-mind. Shite. Where do I dunk my stupid head :-S